From Crowning To Decrowning

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) is a prominent British novelist, art theorist and philosopher of international fame of the day, prolific in literary as well as philosophical writing. Both as a philosopher and a novelist, she likes to employ novel as a vehicle for presenting her philosophical thinking. Her novels are, in a way, fictional illustrations and artistic representations of some of her most essential philosophical ideas on the life experience and the nature of reality, such as fantasy, love, attention and goodness. Murdoch pays special attention to modern people'worldly seek to the concepts of love and goodness, and points out that in that process the most serious mental disease of modern people is"fantasy"; only under the guidance of the goodness and only by regarding other people as unique individuals and replacing fantasy with attention, can one recognize the truth.The novel The Black Prince, published in 1973, won the Black Memorial Prize of the year for Iris Murdoch, and also was considered as her masterpiece of her latter period. In Murdoch's elaborate design, all the characters in the novel launch a subversive grand performance, and she places the whole story in a carnival type of"second life of human beings"mode, deliberately breaks taboos and constraints and undisguisedly exposes the hidden side of humanity and truth in daily life. Although the critics have interpreted its philosophical themes, narrative techniques and artistic viewpoints, few have ever proposed theoretical connections between The Black Prince and the poetics of carnival, and given any critical analysis in this line. The thesis attempts to interpret its narrative features and significance in light of Bakhtin's theory of carnivalization and aims to proclaim how Murdoch, the writer who inherits and carries forward the 19th century British and Russian realist novel tradition to write, skillfully use"carnival"to work out the novel.The thesis discovers that the carnival elements are embodied in the carnival framing, the carnival story, the carnival symbols and the carnival within carnival—intertextuality. Employed with postmodern narrative techniques and contingencies for designing the plots, Murdoch makes the whole novel a preposterous and absurd carnival performance. The carnival symbols such as the carnival squares and the carnival clowns: on the carnival squares which spreads out from the residences of characters in the novel and filled with various clowns, people interact freely with each other, and see more clearly about themselves and their relationships with others. Intertextuality also contributes much to constitute the internal tension the story and to consolidate the stage and atmosphere for the carnival. They open up a more genuine sense of themselves and of their relationship to another.In The Black Prince, with the use of the carnival structure—the crowning /decrowning ritual, Murdoch completes the main narrative framework. The carnival king—the protagonist Bradley is also an image of both sides of guilt and good. Replaced fantasy with attention, by way of realization of the carnival spirit of renewal, Murdoch discusses an essential problem in her own moral philosophy—how an egoist's pilgrimage to Goodness through the medium of love in the novel.